


The Stars (only) at Night

by Ranae



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, Arabic Themes, Family, Gen, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-03-14 08:30:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3403904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranae/pseuds/Ranae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Julian's estranged cousin comes to visit, the Doctor is forced to come to terms with the past, and face the truth of the tenuous future he has build on Deep Space Nine. </p><p> </p><p>I have changed/expanded Julian's back story somewhat, but otherwise it's mainly cannon compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! So this has a lot of Arabic/Amazigh(Berber)/North African themes. Please feel free to correct me if there are mistakes, but also note that since it's in the future, the culture will have changed.

Julian opened his eyes so marginally that he could hardly see through the thick wreath of his own lashes. His pad was blinking, light blue and steady as breathing, on the pillow next to him.

A curl of foreboding twisted in his stomach, but he shut his eyes tightly and pressed his face down into Garak’s forearm. The Caradassian was still asleep beside him, breathing too softly to be heard, and preternaturally still. He tried to concentrate on the pulse he could feel when he pressed his lips against the soft skin of Garak’s inner arm. The subtle difference between the human heart and the rhythm of a Cardassian one was intriguing, though, short of cracking his lover open like a child with a clam, he doubted he would ever find out exactly what made the rhythm trip just slightly before the third thump. It wasn’t something he’d read about, but he doubted many xeno-cardiologists conducted their studies in such an intimate manner.

Under his cheek, Garak’s muscles twitched, and he squeezed one eyes open to watch his fingers twitch is the flickering blue light. It was as good an indication as any that the Cardassian was asleep, if only because he would not allow such movements if he were awake. His sigh skittered down Garak’s forearm, and his fingers twitched a little more insistently.

There was nothing for it now, no going back to sleep. The doctor reached for his pad with slow, careful movements, and he could feel ever minute of the twenty-three hour shift he had pulled in the stiffness of his shoulders. It flicked on in his hands before he could tilt it down and into the pillow. A second later he felt a tiny puff of air on the back of his neck as the Cardassian behind him startled to wakefulness. So much for that.

 “Eid Mubarak!” said the subject line of the first message, and the sense of unease grew, by his estimation, it was still Ramadan, though the Lunar calendar was admittedly quite difficult to follow in space. He clicked on it, holding his lip nervously between his teeth.

“Shit!” he said, a moment later, jolting straight up in bed. His elbow clipped Garak, who had slunk into a half sitting position in an attempt to spy unobtrusively over his shoulder, in the chin. “Fucking God-damn shit!”

“My dear,” the Cardassian said plaintively and rolled over onto his back, nearly toppling off of Julian’s regulation sized mattress. He held his chin pointedly and glared up at the human.        

“Sorry,” Julian said, patting his chest vacantly, still bent over the pad. The light cast his face and torso in strange shadow, and to Garak he looked almost ghostly against the blackness of his quarters. “Its—my cousin is coming to visit.”

Garak threw his arm over his eyes, “my dear, can this not wait until the morning?”

“I have to clean,” he whispered, peering out into the darkness of his cabin, “I have to clean everything… Do you think it’s possible to gain twenty pounds in a week and a half?”

“You’re the doctor my dear, though I would say it is probably not advisable,” he said. “As a Cardassian, I am accustomed to the demands family places on an individual, but surely you could—“

“I could what? What Garak? The station doesn’t exactly make warp speed! I’m trapped here like a rat in a barrel,” he said, miserably hysterical, “she’d probably find a way to get to me even if I went out on the Defiant.”

“Mixed metaphors aside my dear, could this, perhaps, have anything to do with your recent outing, as it were?” Garak asked.

“Probably,” Julian pushed a hand through his hair. It greasy and the strands very nearly stuck to his fingers. How Garak had been sleeping with his face buried in it, he had no idea. “I—well, she hasn’t mentioned it, but I’m certain she knew about it. We grew up together—so. But she’s coming for Eid or she says she’s coming for Eid, anyway. I knew something was wrong when she said she’d be traveling during Ramadan—I mean, space travel when your schedule is determined by a star is kind of--”

“Julian,” Garak said, in the pained voice he usually reserved for when the doctor attempted to dress himself, “I’m assuming Eid is an Terran holiday?”

“Eid-al-Fitr. It’s a holiday for a religious group from earth, which my cousin is a part of. Islam. That is the, err, the group. And Ramadan is the holy month which proceeds it. People fast—don’t eat or drink—from sunrise until sunset.”

 “And what does this holiday entail? Is it like Yule?” Garak narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like Yule or the sweaters that went along with it.

“Ahhh…” Julian stared up at the ceiling, where his shadow was leering down at him. “Kind of. Lots of food, prayer and family. Usually not a lot of gift giving—well, we never gave gifts, but some people do.”

“I never realized you were… religious,” Garak said, narrowing his eyes further. The word had floated out half disbelieving, half disapproving, but Julian just rolled his eyes.

“I’m not. Most Terrans aren’t,” he said. “Look, you can ask her about when she visits. She wants to meet you.”

“Oh, really?” Garak grinned, “I do so relish the opportunity to learn more about Terran culture.”

Julian snorted and shook his head, “She’s not a model of Terran culture—I think most Terrans would be offended by that, actually. And a Cardassian, relish another culture? Even you’re not that good of a liar, Garak.”

“I relish you, don’t I? Ravage too, when I can spare a minute.”

Regrettable as that set up might have been, it still made Julian pink, and he coughed, pointedly looking back up at his shadow.

“She doesn’t know about—us,” Julian said, looking down and making a vague gesture between them, which made Garak’s eye ridges twitch. “Islam—well, it’s not done. I mean, she knows about me and she said you know, some things about love—but this, I don’t think it’s what she had in mind when she gave me that speech about being Allah’s creation.”

Garak looked like he was going to reply but then just tugged the human down and against his chest.

“Doctor,” he rumbled, “as we have agreed to not tell any one about… this, I hardly see what the problem will be.”

“Her,” Julian said, nodding against his broad chest. “It will be her. Can you wake me up when you leave in the morning?”

“My dear, it’s a full three hours before your shift,” Garak kissed the back of his neck, trailing his teeth along the line where his hair met the skin of his neck. “You were on your feet nearly twenty-four hours yesterday. Sick bay won’t fall apart without you.”

“I have to clean. I wasn’t kidding about that, you know.”

“I will hire someone for you.”

“I meant Sick Bay. My office—I mean my filing system is a mess, equipment needs to be organized—mmmh!” Julian broke off when Garak clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Nurses, Doctor, you have half a dozen lovely young people who will do whatever you ask. Please stop licking my hand and go back to sleep.”

Fine, is what Julian tried to say, but Garak had not moved his hand, so he thought it as aggressively as he could. Which was enough, somehow, to make him realize that his lover may have a point.

He grumbled, and gave Garak’s fingers a last nip before settling next him and closing his eyes. The last thing he felt before drifting off was the brush of Garak’s thumb over his lower lip.                                                             


	2. Chapter 2

_The sun streams through the closed blinds of the little mud brick house, right in the middle of the street, two lefts and a five minute walk away from the transporter pad. A necessity, since both Abu and Um Anas work at the University of Cairo, and the town they live in is built of the ruins of an ancient city deep in the Libyan Desert. His uncle’s people have lived here for nearly seven thousand years, largely uninterrupted, except for a great grandfather who had lived for a dozen or so years in Palm Springs._

_Its hot, incredibly, unbearably, don’t go out between eleven and four, hot. All the windows are open to let in the meagre breeze because all of the climate control power goes to irrigation and they really can’t spare a joule (‘But we can spare a Jules’ has become his Uncle’s favourite joke, followed by everyone in earshot sighing in unison.)._

_Inside the house, his uncle is stirring an old iron soup pot while his wife admonishes him from her spot at the kitchen table, marking a pile of essays, red pen softly annihilating hopes and strangling half formed ambitions in their cradles._

_‘What, are you beating eggs? You shame my mother’s recipe!’_

_Then her husband’s rebuttal: ‘Ah, and you would blacken it, habibi—nothing you’ve ever put in a pot has come out edible! You curdle water. Take your bloodlust out on grad students, not my chickpeas.’_

_Their bickering was near constant, and had been the third partner in their relationship since they met. It was always low level, like the hum of machine in the background of household life, so unlike his parent’s fighting—explosive and usually resolved by his mother demurring and his father looking sick with himself. Or her. Julian never could tell._

_He can smell the desert outside, just beyond the city limits, held back by the constant effort of terraformers, who also ensured the little garden at the back of the house blossomed and produced the best vegetables he can ever remember eating. The sky is bright and clear blue, the color it always was in the desert, and later he and Anas and Nura would walk to the outer limits, into the sand dunes and through the twisted black rocks that framed the village on all sides, protecting it from the wind and the world._

_They will walk until the lights of the town fade into a soft glow, until the only guide is the sliver of the moon and the stars. Such stars—all of them, if they were any judge, taking up more of the sky than the black surrounding them. They will count the satellites and ships quietly crossing like leaves on the face of a cosmic ocean, heedless of the three tiny voyeurs, invisible, uncountable and away from a world that continued to expand around them, devouring, listening and laying in quiet, if benevolent, wait._

_In the desert there are still storms which are not dulled by shielding, that can rip a man to pieces and annihilate herds of animals, still scorpions and snakes with poison in them, not the toothless, fed creatures of petting parks and protected sanctuaries. When the wind comes crawling across the dunes, startling up sand, it will tweak the hair of his arms and send a shudder of awareness down his spine, and his heart will quicken, eyes adjust and hearing pick up so that he can listen past the itching rasp of sand and twisting air for whatever it was that twitched the in the corner of his vision. Real danger, sending his blood sprinting through his veins, clutching at his lungs—worth it, worth it easily for the knowledge that not a soul or circuit in the world knew where they were in that moment._

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Julian woke with a gasp this time, flinching back to himself like he had been dreaming of falling. The desert yawned, clear as pure water behind his eyes, and he longed for its openness and heat now, so far removed from the cold and alienation of space.

The room was kept oppressively hot and humid for Garak’s benefit, and while he usually didn't mind, right now he felt like a lobster being lowered into a pot . He pulled in a lung full of air and nearly gagged—it was like inhaling soup.

“Computer,” he hissed, “lower humidity to 20%.”

He kept heaving air until he could feel the dryness in the back of his throat—it was such a relief, though he was so covered in sweat he would probably need to change the sheets. Still—even sweating, even sick with the heat and the damp, he could feel the gnawing cold of space in his bones— the sensation of being without sun, which went to deep for him to ever feel comfortably warm in space.

 Garak was long gone, but he had tucked his side of the blankets around Julian’s back. Julian shook them off, instead of luxuriating in the tiny show of affection, as he often did when his alien lover was not around. He was no fool, well, he was a bit of one, but even he knew that Garak must know how Julian really felt about him. It didn't stop him from wanting to hide it, to hold onto some of his dignity and pretend that he really was in it just for the sex. The man had enough over on him, he didn't need to have that too.

He got out of bed unsteadily, clutching at furniture like an old man, until he made it to the window. The stars outside were clearer now than they had been in his dream—but it seemed too clear, as if the veil of the stratosphere had been the barrier he needed to appreciate their beauty while remaining removed from their frigidity.

Then he turned and surveyed the wreck of his quarters. Nura would be here in a week and a half—and he could not let her find a love nest, or worse, the sad shell of bachelor living. He had not seen his cousin in the living flesh since the day he left for Deep Space 9, though they had kept in contact through messages, and he had to make sure that his life, such as it was, matched the one he had described in his letters, to the nearest detail he could manage--even though she had always seen past his verbal deluges to the few things left he unsaid.

He paused, midway the bathroom. He walked back to the window and pulled the blinds shut, smoothing his palm over them, content to pretend they were only a rough patch of wall.

 


	3. Chapter 3

“Is your cousin very tall, sir?” came Nurse Skryabina’s dry tone, a second after Julian heard the soft whoosh his office door opening.

“I’m sorry?” the doctor said, twisting his face under his arm so that he could see her from where he stood atop his desk, braced against the wall in an attempt to get at the thin line of dust, that he was most definitely not imagining, on the boring, Starfleet issue painting that hung next to his desk. When he had contorted far enough to glimpse her face, he saw that it was as flat and uninterested as usual.

“Your cousin’s ship is in early. So if you were serious about that medically induced coma, now’s the time, sir.” She said blandly, and spun a golden curl around her red lacquered finger nail.

“Oh, ah thank you, Nurse!” Julian said, and scrambled back up the wall like a gecko until he was in a semi standing position. He meant to push of the wall gently, but as he started to the desk shifted slightly and he was sent lurching over backwards, arms pin-wheeling. Trying to stabilize himself, he over compensated and pitched forward, nearly face planting, before he managed to get himself under control and step delicately down from his desk. Evidently, they had not augmented everything—or perhaps they had, and Julian had grown so used to hiding he wasn’t sure which behaviours were real, and which he had created to make himself seem more normal.

“Good to see you dirt side again, sir,” She said, still leaning against the door and playing with her hair, as if her direct supervisor hadn’t almost dashed his brains out on his own desk. It made him smile, to know he still bored her as much as he always had. People’s reaction to him had changed, since they found out about the augment, it seemed they either avoided the subject altogether, masterfully steering the conversation around topics ranging from his family to sports to star fleet policy, some even stopped themselves midsentence when complaining about bumps and bruises, as if he were going to comment about how much faster he healed, or, and this was, in his opinion, far worse, they went out of their way to show him how little it mattered to them, passing greetings became extravagant, and in one instance a colleague had stayed at a lunch table a full forty minutes after her meal was finished, probably cutting into her shift, to avoid it seemingly like she was avoiding him. He had felt bad for her for the first few minutes, but the feeling had gradually morphed into a perverse pleasure he internally blamed Garak for cultivating in him.

“Sir,” she said, raising a sculpted blond brow at him, and he realized he had been staring into the middle distance for what was probably an inappropriately long time.

“Ah, sorry, just a little tired,” he said sheepishly, and scrubbed at the back of his hair. He walked past her into the mostly empty Sick Bay. “Do we—do we keep feather dusters um--here? Do people use them on this station?”

“Not in this Sick Bay, but what people get up to on their own time is their affair,” she said, and pursed her perfect red lips in the suggestion of distain— as if making a full expression was too taxing for her. “’Bara told me you pulled a double shift, sir.”

Julian felt the absurd need to hide his face, like a little boy in the principal’s office, but said very primly, “We had seven cases of Bolian Syphilis, Nurse. Generally that sort of thing is treated with some severity.”

“Hmm,” she conceded, and the sound was painful, as if it hurt her to admit that he, her superior officer, might be right about something, “That may be, and Bolian syphilis may be one of the most virulent STIs in existence, and ‘Bara also told me that three of them had entered the… aggressively amorous stage, but—and this may shock you—there are other health care professionals on this station. Some of them have even puzzled out how to hold a tricorder. Sir.”

Julian knew he should be firm, that he should be a strong and authoritative figure for the nursing staff to look up to and trust, that his word should be final, “It’s not the first double I’ve puled Nurse, thank you for your concern, even if it is misplaced.”

It sounded like a whine in his own ears, and Nurse Skryabina (her first name was Valentina, but neither he nor any of the other medical staff had ever dared use it), only shook her head faintly, “In any case, your cousin’s ship will arrive within the hour, so I would suggest a quick departure, sir.”

“Aright, Alright. Why are you so invested in this, anyway?”

“From your description of her, any delay on your part would result in her a tearing in the space-time continuum, and I have leave coming up that I would like the universe to be intact for, sir.” She pointed her chin toward the door, and he realized that she had slowly come to stand between him and the door to his office.

For a second, he looked desperately for something to give him a reason to stay—then shook his head and firmed his resolve. He plucked a bit at his hair, which was fairly greasy, but there was probably no time for a shower now, and straightened his uniform.

He took a step toward the door, then looked back to his nurse, who, despite the obvious gravity of the situation, was still looking at him as if he were white paint drying on a wall, “just—“

“I will see to it that no one bleeds on anything, sir,” she nodded smartly.

He nodded back and departed the Sick Bay.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

When she came, she moved like a shadow through the sea of colour around her.

Nura had eyes like no one else he had ever met. They were sable, like worn leather, and they were—old, somehow, old and knowing like the eyes of an ancient statue. They stared out of his earliest and most blurry childhood memories, of the time before the procedure, and they scanned the crowd exiting the Bajoran ship for him now.

 He raised his hand straight up, like he was asking a question in class, but did not call out because his throat was suddenly thick with emotion. It had been years, he had not seen her in person since he left for DS9.

He saw the exact moment she caught sight of him, and her vaguely inquiring expression transformed into a wide, lovely smile. The crowd seemed to part in front of her, and he could see eyes watching them both, but he hardly cared, despite everything, all his trepidation and terrified cleaning, it was incredibly good to see her.

She was about as tall as he was, though for much of their childhood she had been head and shoulders above him, and, other than her eyes, which were from her mother’s (and his mother’s) side, she was all her father: dark skin over sharp, aquiline features. She wore a head scarf and black abaya that was embroidered with red thread around the cuffs and hemline.

“Julian! As-Salamu alaykum wa Rahmatullaahi1!” she said excitedly, when she was close enough to be heard over the crowd.

“Wa-Alaikum-Salaam 2,” he said, and allowed himself to be pulled forward and kissed (twice) on both cheeks. He was grinning hugely, he knew, and all of his doubts had fallen away. “Keef halak3?”

“Al-hamdililah4,” she said, “Keef halak, habibi?5”

“Mumtaz6, now that you’re here, Nura. Let me take your things.”

She raised an eyebrow at his return to standard, and responded, still smiling, “were you only going to greet me in Arabic?”

He blushed, and said, in Arabic, “ _Sorry. It has been a long time_.”

“ _Too long_ ,” she nodded and handed him her bags. The rolling luggage was eerily cold to the touch.

“ _How long are you staying?_ ” He grunted, hefting her third bag over his shoulder, making a show of testing its weight, but Nura had already started off in the direction of the promenade, and he had to take a few quick steps to catch up with her. 

“ _I’m moving in Julian, didn’t I tell you? I’ve come here to nag you for the rest of your life. Faisal will be along shortly with the bride I have picked out for you,_ ” she said and grinned at him. “ _You’ll like her, her unibrow is nearly as full as yours.”_

 “ _I don’t have a unibrow!”_ He squawked, resisting the temptation to reach up and make sure it hadn’t grown in since the last time he looked in the mirror. He doubted her brows had ever been plucked, but they laid flat, and separated on her face, docile, while his own, if left for more than a week or so at a time, would become a single massive caterpillar. Palis had wanted him to get electrolysis or find some other, more permanent solution, but he had never gotten around to it.

She laughed, “Y _ou would if you didn’t pluck it. He’s sorry he couldn’t come, anyway, he had some sort of something for poets on Vulcan,_ ” she waved her hand to indicate her incomprehension of her husband, and it seemed, poets as a general category, “ _he complains all year that he doesn’t know anyone on Terra, but as soon as he’s needed for something, suddenly he’s_ Mr. Popular.”

Julian laughed at the pop of English, maybe a little too loudly, because the Bajoran woman walking next to them raised her eyebrows and looked pointedly away.

He realized then, with something like panic, that he had just left it open for her to ask about any significant others in his life, and he sputtered out, “ _so, um uh, how, how are the cousins_?”

Nura pursed her lips, and tapped the lower one with a finger. Her nails were cut down to the quick and ruthlessly clean, “ _they are good, no changes since my last message—_ “ she paused, looking a little guilty and it was clear to Julian that she was about to tell him every detail her letters had missed in the past year, “ _well there is one thing, Rubaiya is getting married, to a man from Laos, it’s all very controversial since he’s_ …”

One thing quickly multiplied to two, to a half dozen, to Julian tuning her out to the point that he could enjoy the familiar hum of her voice without having to puzzle out which Aisha she was taking about. Nura liked to keep him apprised of her family’s goings on, which he appreciated, even if he did just skim most of it. Her family was massive, half their village was somehow related, and there always seemed to be weddings or engagement parties or birthdays that he was meant to send a missive for, even though he hadn’t seen most of them in he didn’t know how many years. Well, no, that wasn’t quite right. It had been five years. Five years almost exactly.

“… _so any way, they’re not get married, he’s moved to Mars and I suppose it’s all turned out well enough,”_ they were nearly to the turbolift when she finished speaking. Which meant she had probably given him the short version.

“ _Is that right?”_ he said absently.

“ _And how are your people?”_ She asked, and regarded him with a shrewd expression, “ _you talk about them less_.”

He hadn’t noticed.

“ _They’re all fine,_ ” he said dismissively, directing her left with a tap on the shoulder, “ _more of the same.”_

“ _And the Trill one, what was she called? Jazba? Is she still making eyes at the Klingon?”_ Nura asked. She knocked her shoulder against his and raised her eyebrows.

“ _Oh, you mean Jadzia?”_ he asked, her name coming out a little funny in an Arabic accent. He grinned, “ _I’ve never seen her like this. I finally have something to tease her about.”_

_“I just wonder how you noticed? You never were the most observant of people, habibi.”_

They reached the lift and she pushed the ‘up’ button with her thumb. It was marked by a jagged white scar that he was certain hadn’t been there the last time they had met, it stretched from the corner of her nail across the knuckle, disappearing into the meat of her palm. If he knew her, it had never seen a dermal regenerator for anything more than a cursory closing of the wound, probably reopening more than once, with the thickness of the tissue over her knuckle.

 “ _I’m Star Fleet officer,_ ” he said, his attempt at looking smug somewhat distorted by the bags hanging off his body like clinging monkeys. “ _We’re trained to—“_

 _“The Cardassian told you, didn’t he?”_ she said, smugly and shot him a lazy grin.

“ _He did not_ ,” Julian squawked, a little frazzled by her mention of Garak, and Nura smirked at him, taking that as an affirmative. “ _One of my colleagues may have indicated that, she thought, there might be some type of relationship developing, in some respect.”_

_“Jabara? Wallah 7, half the people of this station have a ‘J’ name.”_

_“Jabara,”_ he nodded, sheepish. “ _I hope you won’t be bored here, it seems to me you already know the plot and all the characters.”_

 “ _The holovid is always light years different from the book,”_ she said lightly.

He laughed nervously and punched the button for the turbo-lift again. The DS9 he presented in his letters—well, he had reread a few of them from the early days of his deployment, and it was all a little… rose coloured. Terrifying near death experiences toned down to sweeping adventures, heart shredding losses were characters who gradually faded from plot lines, though perhaps his gravest misrepresentation was referring to Quark’s as a “restaurant”.

He chattered about the rest of them, his people, as Nura called them, all the way up to his quarters, and she nodded along, only half listening, as he had done.

He watched her face as the entered his quarters. He knew how they must look to her, a few pieces of slightly off putting Starfleet issue art on the walls, hard, bitterly square couches and a general greyness that screamed how unattached he was. It contrasted sharply with the home that she had grown up in, and the beautiful flat in dusty Cairo where she lived now, which he had only seen through video communications.

Her home, and it had been his home too, every summer and holiday from school that lasted longer than a day or two, was warm and smelled like lemon and herbs and tomato plants. Not tomatoes—but the bright scent of the plant itself. There were always people in it, Nura giggling in Tuareg8 with Berber9 girlfriends (it was their secret language, she and Julian were the only ones in the house who spoke it, and he had only learned to impress the pretty Tuareg girl down the street) in the back garden, drinking tea in careful, ladylike sips while Anas and his football mates raided the kitchen for the cookies that his uncle always seemed to be baking, which were _meant for guests, not your grubby hands, young man!_

Great metal carafes of coffee decorated the house like Grecian statues in a garden, spiced with cardamom and saffron, as his aunt preferred, and waiting for (or been forgotten after) the coming of guests, who were sometimes there for tea, sometimes coffee, but always, it seemed, staying for dinner— _But only if your husband is cooking, Um Anas 10! My daughter is getting married next month and I would like to be around to see it!_

 One member or another of his uncle’s family had lived there for over two hundred years, fixing it up, planting gardens, a few adding on wings and bringing other family members to live, and the house very much had a sense of place. Much of the family has settled in that town, though much more of it was spread across the edges of the Sahara, dotted through the Middle East and with the occasional outpost in Europe. A few still roamed the desert as pastoralists. Julian had liked visiting these relations best when he was a child, because they (he, Anas and a horde of cousins) would inevitably all be piled into the back of a pick-up truck (with his assurances he would not breathe a word to his parents or any other foreigners), and driven at top speed over the sand dunes until their bones had rattled nearly out of their skins. And at night, he and all the boy cousins, uncles and grandfathers would sit together on the cooling sand and watch that last rays of the sun fade. They told old stories, or traced back their lineages, through men who were only names to Julian, but were as much part of the men around him as their blood and bone. He knew the names of those ancestors better than he knew his own.

The Bedouin11, though apparently a wandering people, had a far better sense of place, and of self as part of their cultural group, even when they were as settled as his uncle, than Julian had ever managed. He was English, that’s what he told people, even the ones who’d pause a second and look like they wanted to ask a follow up question. His father was out of Lahore, and he knew he had a few uncles there, but he hadn’t spoken to them since he was very small. His mother never really mentioned her childhood in Khartoum, and when she spoke Arabic, usually only in greeting, it was with stilted, English vowels. Her sister—Nura’s mother—had grown up in the same house of bare headed, atheist women, but upon entering university promptly forsook the English language, covered her hair and married a Bedouin.

He is jolted from his thoughts by Nura’s noncommittal, “ _very nice!_ ”

He can read it as: no worse than I was expecting, praise be to God. He was putting her up in his room, while he would take the couch. There had been no talk of guest quarters. He was nervous, as he finally dumped her bags at the foot of the bed with a groan, ignoring her admonishments about his lack of care, that he had forgotten something.

Two days ago he had barred Garak from his quarters—the Cardassian was always turning up—and turned out and cleaned every inch. It wasn’t dust he was worried about, but anything… incriminating. There was _always_ something, an errant packet of lube in with the spices, that he had only noticed later and realized that she _must_ have seen when she was making them dinner, (she had never brought it up, but he confessed it to Anas later and he howled with laughter ( _“what if you used it as mustard… or visa versa!_ )), the condom in the shower drain, a pattern for a dildo in his replicator, and memorably, when he had gotten his first apartment in San Francisco, Anas had tripped, grabbed a curtain for support and ended up pulling down the thick, hollow curtain rod along with it, which he had, in the twenty minutes warning they had given of their arrival, stuffed with the condoms from his bed side drawer, along with a few illicit substances of Orion origin. Anas had nearly burst his spleen laughing while his sister purpled, and told them very firmly that they would be going out for dinner immediately. This time would be different, everything and anything vaguely suggestive, (including a rather oddly shaped gourd Keiko had given him last Yule) had been gathered up and shoved into a very confused Garak’s arms that morning, with a brief kiss and promise to repay him for the storage using the exiled items (excluding the gourd).

“ _The washroom is just through there,”_ Julian said, pointing through the door way. His cousin nodded, not trying to mask her perusal of his bedroom. Well, she was a snoop, but at least she was an honest snoop. She came to a stop at the shelving unit next to his bed.

“ _Who’s this?_ ” Nura murmured. “ _Kukalaka? You still have him?”_

 Julian felt a blush steal across his face, “ _yes._ ”

When he looked, her expression was tender and she held the toy in front of her as delicately as if it were a baby, “ _do you remember when he ripped, you were very little, but you insisted on fixing him, not buying another. Oh, you cried! Anas felt so awful that he let the other boys take it from you!”_

He did remember, a vague, hazy memory from the time before the procedure, of stabbing his fingers with a tiny silver pin and painstakingly dragging the thread through the thick fabric of his best friend. Nura, eight to his five, and therefore the oracle of all earthly wisdom, and his general hero, sitting next to him in the back yard and murmuring that he was 'a natural at this'. He remembered sucking the blood off of his dirty fingers, the smell of bread baking, and the dull thumps of Anas kicking a soccer ball against the side of the house. His Aunt was going to come out in a minute and yell at him to stop, she was working, and the house was too old to stand up to that kind of treatment, besides.

And if she remembered that, remembered the small boy who had never not needed help with something, who had to be coached, reminded and encouraged through even the simplest tasks, from peeling a banana to counting to ten to Nura’s painstaking, thousand-fold explanations of an olive and it’s relation to olive oil. And if she remembered, just as well as he remembered, then she must know, she must have always known. He opened his mouth to finally put to words the question that had been burning in his throat for nearly fifteen years, but, as always she beat him too it.

The sound of music, and a voice calling out spilled out of her smallest bag, she carefully replaced the bear and then pulled a little communicator out of the side pocket. The sound swelled, and he abruptly realized it was the Call to Prayer12, something he had not heard in five years, and not needed in many more.

“Maghrib13,” he murmured, and she nodded distantly, already pulling out a prayer mat from the same bag, “I’ll leave you too it.”

Neither commented on his slip back into standard. He took the largest bag, the one that had been cold, back out with him into the dining area, having guessed its purpose.

He sat on the couch, and pulled out a data pad from under the coffee table. He brought up this morning’s reports, and flicked through them, not really reading the words or heeding the figures. There were a few messages waiting for him, from Garak, Miles and a couple from his staff, but he left them, the irritation of the blinking light on the side of his pad not enough to spur him into opening them.

He was lost to his thoughts and the comforting haze that gazing sightlessly at a screen always seemed to bring him, when he heard the shwoosh of doors opening. He looked up just as the doors closed after her.

Nura had changed into a peach sundress and a pair of orange slippers that clashed horribly. Her hair was unbound, and with a start, Jullian realized that it was the first time he had seen it thus in six years. Thin streaks of grey nestled in her curls like adders, where it had been pure ebony the last time he had seen it, and under the unforgiving lights of his quarters, he could see every line on her face, deeper and more numerous now than just the charming crow’s feet that appeared with her frequent smiles, the dark tired hollows under her eyes bruise-like. She looked tired, and old, he thought, chilled to his spine.

When he met her eyes they were quiet, as if she were reading the same things in his face, but before he could look away, she smiled and the age and exhaustion seemed to slide away.

“ _Come on, Julian, I need to break the fast_ ,” she said, tipping her head toward his seldom used table.

He went to sit at the table, eyes still on his pad, and listened to her rummage through her bag. To his surprise, she pulled out two plates wrapped in plastic and slid one across the table to him. For a long minute, the only sound was the crinkling of the plastic as they unwrapped them. The porcelain dishes were piled with hummus, and pickled vegetables. A bag of thick pita bread was unearthed from a pocket and she put it down between them with a few dried dates.

“Bismillah14,” she said, and tore a pita in half. She didn’t look up.

Not for the first time that evening, words stuck in his throat and he just took the proffered half a pita and started eating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 “As-Salamu alaykum we Rahmatullahi,”: Peace and mercy and blessings of God be upon you. Basically a greeting, or a religious/Muslim (and more respectful) version of ‘hello’. Also, this is the more formal greeting, most people would just say “As-salamu alaykum”. There is also some debate as to if this should be used by non-Muslims or who they should reply if greeted in this way. It’s all very political, and like most things in religion, people’s opinions are all over the place. 
> 
> 2 “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam,”: And peace upon you also, a response to the above.
> 
> 3 “Keef halak?”: How are you? There are different ways to say this in Libyan Arabic, but I’m lazy so most Arabic will probably be Levantine or Egyptian, and we can blame it on changes in language over time.
> 
> 4 “Al-hamdulillah,”: Thanks/praise be to God. It can be a religious (it is also used by Christians and Jews) response to ‘how are you?”, as well as a phrase used to just thank God after something has happened, or something has been achieved. Kind of like hallelujah, but less weird to say after ‘how are you?’
> 
> 5 “habibi”: Darling. General term of endearment, and fairly common, depending a bit on where you are in the Arabic speaking world, (in Lebanon they call everyone habibi). 
> 
> 6 “Mumtaz”: Wonderful, or amazing 
> 
> 7 “Wallah,”: I swear. Kind of a religious word because it references God, like “I swear/promise to/with God”, often used more seriously than it is here, like to promise one’s credibility or something. 
> 
> 8 The Tuareg are properly called “Imuhagh”, they are a nomadic ethnic group living in the Sahara and considered part of the larger Berber people
> 
> 9 The Berber people are properly called “Amazigh” and are a nomadic ethnic group/ grouping of ethnic groups living in the Sahara desert.
> 
> 10 Um Anas is a respectful way of addressing a Nura’s mother and all mothers in Arabic. ‘Um’ means mother or mother of, while ‘Anas’ is the name of her eldest son. ‘Abu’ means father of, and using Abu and then the first name of the son is also a respectful way to address a father. So when Nura’s father is addressed he would be “Abu Anas”. This is how most people, both friends, and strangers would address a person, though this does vary a little bit by geography and other factors. Sometimes even young men will be called Abu (name of their father), meaning that they will someday have a son who they will name after their father. 
> 
> 11 The Bedouin are an Arab cultural group who lives throughout the Middle East and North Africa and are traditionally nomadic, though many have settled down. They speak Bedawi, an older, more sort of ‘harsh’ sounding type of Arabic. Nura’s father and Nura herself are Bedouin. There had been, and there still is (in our modern time, not the time of hthe story) conflict between Bedouin/other Arab groups and Berber peoples, including the Tuareg. It’s very political and long standing, but at the time this story is set, they have made peace. 
> 
> 12 The call to prayer is done five times a day, and used to actually be called, but is now done mostly by loud speaker, from the minarets of Mosques. It calls the Muslim community of that area to pray. Muslims (observant ones at least) pray five times a day.
> 
> 13 this is the name of the evening prayer, and fourth of the day. During the holy fasting month of Ramadan (which has actually just ended in real life), Muslims fast the entire day only break the fast when the sun goes down, after evening prayer, in a meal called iftar.
> 
> 14 Bismillah is traditionally said by Muslims before beginning something, and is always (or should always be) said before beginning to eat. Almost like saying grace before meals for Christians, but not quite the same.


	4. Chapter 4

_Julian’s eyes flick open. The desert sky unfolds before him, pure blue reaching out into eternity to touch the golden sands of the Sahara. The sky is cloudless, shades of blue bleeding into each other like shifting waves, and the moon loiters near the horizon, almost set, while the sun is new in the sky. A pair of vultures spiral in the distance, but otherwise his view is empty of visible life._

_He is sitting on top of a sand dune, first rays of the morning stretching out to greet him, as if he and the sun were great friends, parted for more than just the span of the night. Even when it is high in the sky, it’s heat will not trouble him, protected as he is by a long blue robe, and he knows that underneath, on the skin only his wife may see, his body is coloured faintly blue by the indigo dye leaching slowly into his skin._

_He wets his mouth under the veil he wears, and the sweep of the fabric against his skin as he turns his head should be annoying, but he is used to it after long years of wear. The wind picks up, ruffling the hair of his eye brows, and a chill races down his spine, even as he feels the sun, suddenly not so new anymore, begins to pound his brow, baking his skin even darker._

_Beside him, Nura has her feet burrowed into the sand, and her black robe billows and swirls around her like a vortex. Her face is covered with veil made heavy and still by lines of ancient coins sewn into it. From above the thick red embroidery around the hem, her eyes peek out, serene and watching. Her husband sits next to her, and Julian can only make out his white clothed shoulder, and a long leg that trails down the sand dune._

_The wind quiets and abruptly, he can hear: the faint clinking of Nura’s veil, and the gusty whispers of her husband speaking Bedawi, so rapidly, his ears, attuned to Tuareg, are struggling to make out every word. He is reciting the Koran, it all clicks into place for Julian, and he no longer needs to hear him: the words reverberate from deep with in his memory._

_The laughing of his children, and that of his nieces and nephews brings a smile to his worn face, and he can feel it crinkling like tissue paper. It makes no matter, each line in earned, like the callouses on his gnarled and thick hands. He feels his age in his knees when he extends his legs, feels it when he pokes his tongue through holes where teeth once were, or when his arms, still hard and strong, ache when he lifts his growing children._

_His eyes search for them, for the children, but they must be behind him, or a dune over, because all he finds is the dark form of his wife, sitting farther down the dune, working on something with busy hands. He wants to tell her to stop, to come and sit with them, and that he will make a fire for tea. He begins to shiver, even though the wind has stopped, and when he rubs his fingers together he finds they have lost feeling._

_He knows that under her dark cowl, her dark hair is oiled and held in dozens of tight, Medusoid braids. She is wearing the thick silver bracelets that he gave her on their wedding day, and he likes the way they reflect light onto her warm, dark skin. She has strong hands with thick knuckles from lifting pots and children, but the rest of her is delicate, doe like, and when they are alone he calls her_ ghazal _, because it makes her smile when he speaks Arabic, and because he can never catch her, even now, after so many years, he knows she is leaping bounds ahead of him._

_“Um Mohammed!” Nura’s husband pauses his recitation, calling out to Julian’s wife, “Um Mohammed!”_

_The shivering is worsening and Julian’s entire body is wracked with them, the fabric of this thobe twitches and shakes and he when he looks down at his hands, he sees that his nails are blue. He is freezing, breathing icy air, even as the sun burns the exposed skin of his face._

_He turns to Nura, the wind has stopped, but her clothing is still whirling around her, more violently by the second, like it is about to be torn from her body._

_Her husband is unconcerned, and keeps calling to Julian’s wife. The words of the Koran, the words he is no longer saying, continue to pound through Julian’s head like marching soldiers. His teeth are chattering so loudly he can no longer hear the children, though Nura’s husband’s calls of “Um Mohammed!” reverberate through his skull._

_His wife finally turns, and he cannot see her face, though she does not wear a veil._

_“Yes, yes!” She says in a voice that is one thousand voices, like the voice of the Borg ship. She is walking up the dune with no effort, her steps are light and careful, and she continues in her multitude of voices, “I am working, Abu Anas. Can you not leave a woman to her work?”_

_She holds up her hands and a tiny galaxy rests above them, planets orbiting lazily, with moons zipping around them. At the centre there is a black void, and he knows that she was working on the sun._

_“It’s alright, I mean that it’s fine,” she says, and she is almost upon them. Julian is shaking in earnest now, rocking back and forth like one possessed. “I need just one thing to finish. Imagine, that a woman’s work should be finished?”_

_She stands before Julian and he knows, knows instantly what she needs, and his breathing is rattling, shaking through his chest. He looks up and under her cowl there is nothing but space: the universe, and thousands and millions of stars winking back at him._

_She starts to laugh, a sound at once shrill and joyful, bitter and booming. As the wind starts up again, she throws back her cowl and the universe under it begins to expand, eating up the quiet desert day until he floats alone in eternity._

_=-=-=-=-=-=-=_

Julian woke with a start so hard he pitched himself off the couch and onto the floor. He lay there, breathing heavily, listening for footsteps, and the swish of opening doors, but hearing none. Thank God, if Nura saw him like this she would probably make good on her threat to move to DS9. Or drag him back to Libya. Either way, he'd probably end up married to a girl with a uni-brow. 


End file.
